Ask Me To Touch You
by LikeLightInGlass
Summary: Erik just wants his wife to touch him. He discovers how cruel Christine can be. Leroux based Depictions of emotional and physical abuse, but not graphic. May be disturbing.


"Erik, my darling…"

He bristled. His bride never called him with an affectionate name unless she planned on being particularly cruel.

"Yes…?" he answered in a voice barely above a whisper.

Christine looked exceptionally beautiful tonight, her gold hair glowing in the candlelight and her blue eyes bright and alive with a terrible glint.

"When is the last time someone touched you?"

He whimpered. "Please Christine, not again. You torment your poor Erik!"

"Answer me," she commanded with a hiss. "You deserve to be tormented."

He sank to his knees, tears already welling in his eyes. "Yes my love." He tried to prepare himself for what he knew was coming. The same conversation that happened over and over again since that day. The day his living bride and greatest love became his own personal Hell.

She waited expectantly, lounged across the couch and looking almost bored.

"The last person to touch your poor, unhappy Erik was his lovely wife. Eleven days ago."

She tilted her head to the side and started to smile. It was ghastly. His stomach dropped and he quickly averted his eyes. "And what did I do Erik?"

His hand started to throb as he remembered the last time she did this to him. They had just finished dinner and Christine left the table to sit and read by the fireplace. After cleaning up he went to the drawing room as well. As tumultuous as their relationship had become, he still couldn't bear to be away from her too long.

He thought back to the beginning of this nightmare, two months previously. It was three weeks after their marriage and they were sitting together in the drawing room. She usually quietly allowed his presence as long as he didn't bother her. She spent most of her days ghosting through the house, sleeping, eating, reading, and on occasion doing needlework. She rarely spoke to him, except out of necessity. She barely looked at him. And she never, ever touched him.

It was getting to be too much to bear. He wanted to be normal wife with a normal marriage, and his beautiful Christine had never touched him willingly. She was so devastated at the untimely death of the Vicomte de Chagny she was barely there at all anymore.

On this particular night, he had broken down in tears, and begged his wife for a kiss. Such a little thing to ask, he had thought to himself. You didn't need to love someone to kiss them, he reasoned to himself. You didn't even have to like them. But his little wife had always at least pitied him, and perhaps she could bring herself to grant this small request. He groveled at her feet and begged and pleaded and cried into the hem of her dress.

But unbeknownst to him any compassion or pity Christine had once had for her angel of music had drowned with the Vicomte and the Daroga in the torture chamber. He hadn't come to his senses in time to save them after Christine tearfully agreed to be his wife. After she realized her fiancé was dead, she withdrew into herself and became the dead wife Erik always dreaded she would be. And that's exactly how she was until that night Erik begged her for a kiss.

And for the first time since her near catatonic, "I do" at their makeshift and hasty 'wedding', she spoke to him.

"When is the last time someone touched you?" she had asked.

His tears started anew and he said he couldn't remember. He'd lived for his entire life without a gentle touch, not even from his own mother. He looked up with hope and expectation she might grant his request.

But Christine's capacity for compassion had vanished the day she'd resigned herself to live in a tomb as the bride of a corpse. She had no pity left for the monster and no kindness left to give. Her face turned to stone and her eyes were sharp as a diamond when she finally looked back at him.

"A kiss," she repeated quietly. "A touch."

"Yes, Christine, please my love. Anything." He was weeping openly now, huddled on the floor at her feet. "It's been so long, so very long without a touch…"

She bent down and put her hands on the edges of the mask and began to speak very deliberatly. "You told me you were an angel...but you lied," she said softly as she slowly pulled away his mask. "You told me you would let me have my freedom…but you lied. And lastly, you told me you would let Raoul live…but that was a lie too." Her face was inches from his, her hot breath embracing the dead flesh of his cheek. He wanted to explain himself, say it was an accident about her Vicomte, how sorry he was, but before he could, she spoke again.

"I'm going to kiss you." His heart leapt with joy. She inched closer, took his thin, twisted bottom lip between her two full pink ones….

And bit down hard.

He yelped in pain and surprise and stumbled backward. His lip stung and he could feel blood running down his chin. He looked up in surprise as she calmly stood up straight and walked away. She looked back at him and said pointedly, "I can lie too. Never ask me again."

He thought that was the first and last time his beautiful wife would be so cruel to him, but on that day he stopped living with a ghost…and started living with a monster.

The next day she asked him to whistle for her, knowing moving his swollen lip still hurt tremendously.

A few days later she had asked him that terrible question again. "Erik, darling, when is the last time someone touched you? Surely you must remember now."

He answered her and was asked to describe the incident in excruciating detail. She held more power over him now then she'd ever held over anyone and it was the only thing that brought any joy into her dead heart.

"Ask me to touch you again Erik."

He knew what was coming, but it was the first time his wife had been happy in weeks. He still loved her and could deny her nothing. He asked.

She approached him slowly. She carefully and gently removed his mask and placed it on the table. "I'm going to caress your hideous face now, Erik," she said sweetly.

He closed his eyes and dared to hope this time it wouldn't be a lie. She lifted her hand up to the side of his face and began to stroke it lightly. He was in ecstasy. Her skin was so soft and her touch was so gentle. Tears started to spill out of his tightly closed eyes as her murmured her name.

Then she dug her nails into the dead flesh of his cheek and ripped four gashes into the side of his face.

This time Erik screamed. Pleasure was so suddenly and violently ripped into pain and he sunk to the floor in agony. "Christine, why? Why?" he cried out to her, pressing his hand to the wounds. "Why do you hurt your poor Erik like this? I love you!"

She looked at him with such disgust his blood ran cold. "You lied to me. You killed Raoul. You killed the Persian. And you killed me too. You show your love for me by murdering my lover and locking me in a tomb," she said with venom in her lovely voice. "Well I'm a liar now too. I'm a murderer too. As long as you insist on keeping me in a mausoleum, _husband_ , my every action will be a monument to my hatred for you."

Erik couldn't speak. He had never felt such despair. But he couldn't let her go! Couldn't let his beautiful wife leave, he still loved her so. And she was finally acting alive again. "Christine, Erik will never let you leave. You are his wife and he loves you…"

She stared at him with a blank expression. "Then I do pity you."

The last time they had this conversation, and the time she was asking about now, was eleven days ago. It started the usual way. He recounted for her how it felt when she slashed his face with her nails. She laughed mirthlessly and told him to ask her to touch him again.

"And then, Christine told her Erik she was going to hold his hand," Erik said in a monotone. "Erik was happy that his beautiful wife would do this for him, as no one ever had before. She gently ran her fingers down her husband's forearm and wrist, and she stroked Erik's palm with her thumb." A tear rolled down his mask at the memory. She had been so gentle and so kind and for a moment he had allowed himself to pretend he was a normal man, with a wife who loved him.

"And then you took my finger in your little hands and bent it back so quickly and forcefully the bone snapped."

Christine laughed more heartily this time. "I read about how to do that in one of your books Erik. You do have so much interesting literature down here in Hell. Almost enough to make it worth it to have a demon as my only companion!" she spat sarcastically.

Afterwards, he slunk away and wrapped his finger in a brace. It had throbbed for days afterward, especially since she insisted he play the piano for her. When he asked pitifully if there was something she wished for him to play, she twisted her lips into a terrible grin. "Something that hurts.

His wife had become cold and cruel but at least he could see her smile from time to time, and hear her laugh. This may not be a happy marriage, he thought to himself, but what more could a monster expect from a bride? At least his wife was willing to touch him now. All this time he had hoped Christine would be an angel for him, and bring him into the light. But he had only succeeded in bringing her into the darkness.

"Erik darling?"

"Yes, my love?"

"Ask me to touch you."


End file.
